It feels more correct to say "This food was cooked by the staff of Eat Out restaurant" as opposed to "This food was cooked by the employees of Eat Out restaurant."
I cannot, however explain to an English learner why this is so. Is it just a matter of common usage? Is there a grammatical angle to it?
Answer
This is an example of the very common phenomenon in English (and many other languages for that matter) of having two similar words coming from different origins. Staff is a Germanic word that comes from middle English while employee came into English from French in the 1800s.
In general they can be used interchangeably, but they do have different subtleties. Employee is a bit more formal and it emphasizes that the person doing the work is getting paid. In contrast, staff is a bit more general and simply implies that a person is a member of a group carrying out work.
In your example, both sentences work just fine. The second may seem a bit unnatural because employee is emphasizing that the workers are getting paid, but this is irrelevant in the context of your sentence (just a theory). For somebody learning English as a second language, both should be acceptable in my opinion.
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